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SUMMARY
Yes. Rabat property is genuinely cheaper than it was at the end of 2025, but prices are not falling right now. The latest official quarter shows a rebound after a sharp first-quarter correction.
The correction was substantial by Moroccan property-market standards. Rabat's overall price index fell 4.7% in Q1 2026 and residential prices dropped 6.2%, making the city the weakest of Morocco's main urban markets during that quarter.
The rebound has only recovered part of that decline. After rising 1.9% in Q2, Rabat's overall property index remained about 3% below its end-2025 level, while residential property and apartments were still roughly 4% lower.
Transaction volumes tell a similar story. Sales rebounded more than 60% in Q2, but that surge came after a collapse of more than 55%, leaving activity well below the level recorded before the correction.
Apartments give the clearest picture because they represent a much deeper market than houses or villas. Apartment prices fell 5.9%, recovered 1.9%, and still ended the first half of 2026 about 4.1% below their starting point.
The biggest affordability gap is geographical, not cyclical. Current apartment asking prices around Rabat are roughly 20,100 DH/m², compared with about 9,200 DH/m² in Salé, a difference far larger than Rabat's recent 3% to 4% correction.
Rabat's asking prices also remain stubbornly high. Official transaction data can show a correction even while sellers continue advertising properties above 20,000 DH/m², because the properties that actually sell may be closing below advertised expectations.
Financing has not changed the equation much. With average real-estate lending rates around 5%, a typical 90 m² Rabat apartment at current asking prices can still require a mortgage payment close to 9,600 DH per month with a 20% deposit.
There is little evidence of a Rabat-specific housing glut forcing a broad liquidation. Regional population and household growth remain strong, while cheaper markets such as Salé and the wider metropolitan area give price-sensitive buyers somewhere else to go.
The next official quarters matter more than today's listings. Another decline in apartment prices accompanied by weakening transactions would reopen the case for a deeper downturn; another stable or positive quarter would make Q1 look more like a sharp reset than the start of a prolonged slide.
The practical takeaway is simple: buyers are entering Rabat below late-2025 transaction-price levels, but there is no evidence yet of an ongoing crash. Rabat has become somewhat cheaper; it has not become cheap.
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Are Rabat property prices actually falling now?
Rabat property is still cheaper than it was at the end of 2025, but prices are no longer falling right now.
The latest Bank Al-Maghrib and ANCFCC data show why the picture has become confusing. Rabat property prices fell 4.7% in the first quarter of 2026, the steepest drop among Morocco's major cities. Residential property fell even faster, by 6.2%, while transactions plunged 55.4%.
The next quarter went the other way. Rabat prices rose 1.9%, residential prices increased 2.1%, and transactions jumped 61.2%.
Those two quarters do not cancel each other out. Rabat's overall property index moved from 113.72 at the end of 2025 to 108.23 after the correction, then recovered to 110.30. Prices were therefore still about 3% below their end-2025 level after the rebound.
Residential property remained roughly 4% lower.
So the answer today is fairly clean: Rabat has become cheaper, but the latest official quarter shows a rebound rather than another leg down.
| Rabat market | Q1 2026 | Q2 2026 | Approx. change from end-2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| All property prices | -4.7% | +1.9% | -3.0% |
| Residential prices | -6.2% | +2.1% | -4.2% |
| All transactions | -55.4% | +61.2% | About -28% |
| Residential transactions | -56.6% | +60.5% | Still well below Q4 |
Was Rabat's property correction unusually large?
Yes. Rabat's recent property correction was unusually severe compared with both Morocco overall and the country's other major cities.
The first-quarter fall was 4.7% across Rabat property and 6.2% for residential property. National prices fell much less. Casablanca declined 2.7% during the same quarter and Marrakech 1.5%, while Rabat recorded the biggest drop among the largest urban markets.
The city-level index shows how abrupt the move was. Rabat went from 113.72 at the end of 2025 to 108.23 in a single quarter. For a property index that normally moves in much smaller increments, losing almost five index points that quickly is a big move.
Part of the transaction collapse was seasonal. Moroccan property transactions often fall from the fourth quarter into the first, and the official series is not seasonally adjusted, so the 55.4% drop in sales volume needs some caution.
The price movement is harder to brush aside. A 4.7% quarterly decline, weaker activity and declines across apartments, houses and villas point to a real repricing rather than ordinary quarterly noise.
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Has Rabat fallen more than Casablanca, Marrakech and Tangier since the end of 2025?
Yes. Rabat has had the deepest net correction of Morocco's major property markets so far this year.
After the latest rebound, Rabat's official property index still sat about 3.0% below its end-2025 level. Tangier was around 1.7% lower, Casablanca 1.1% lower and Marrakech about 0.8% lower.
What makes Rabat unusual is the speed of both moves. Prices first fell harder than elsewhere, then rebounded by 1.9% in one quarter. Tangier was the only large city to post a stronger latest-quarter increase, at about 2.3%.
Rabat therefore combines the largest remaining drop from its end-2025 index with one of the strongest recent rebounds.
Meknès and Oujda, by contrast, continued falling in the second quarter. Rabat did not.
| City | End-2025 index | Q2 2026 index | Gap from end-2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rabat | 113.72 | 110.30 | -3.01% |
| Meknès | 110.74 | 107.98 | -2.49% |
| Tangier | 116.75 | 114.73 | -1.73% |
| Casablanca | 103.67 | 102.48 | -1.15% |
| El Jadida | 96.22 | 95.18 | -1.08% |
| Marrakech | 108.74 | 107.88 | -0.79% |
| Oujda | 99.47 | 98.77 | -0.70% |
| Fez | 110.28 | 109.66 | -0.56% |
Are Rabat apartments getting cheaper too?
Rabat apartments are still roughly 4% cheaper than at the end of 2025, although apartment prices have already started recovering.
Apartments fell 5.9% in the first quarter, then rose 1.9% in the second. Chaining those two movements leaves apartment prices about 4.1% below their starting point.
This segment is especially useful because apartments account for far more urban transactions than houses or villas. We get a cleaner read on ordinary Rabat housing from apartments than from the smaller luxury segments.
The latest quarter also showed apartment transactions rising 62.5% while prices increased 1.9%. Buyers clearly became more active once values had reset.
We cannot know from those numbers alone whether buyers were deliberately waiting for lower prices. What we can say is that substantially more apartments changed hands once the market was trading below late-2025 levels.
That makes another immediate 6% collapse difficult to square with the current data.
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What happened to Rabat houses and villas?
Rabat houses and villas also remain below their end-2025 levels, but these smaller markets are much more volatile than apartments.
House prices fell 8.6% in the first quarter and then jumped 6.9%. That still leaves them roughly 2.3% lower across the two quarters.
Villas moved differently. Prices dropped 4.1%, then recovered only 0.6%, leaving an estimated cumulative decline of about 3.5%.
We should not lean too heavily on the exact percentages here. Far fewer houses and villas trade than apartments, so a change in the mix of homes sold can move the index much more dramatically.
Still, the broad direction is consistent: apartments, houses and villas all ended the first half below their late-2025 level.
| Rabat residential type | Q1 price move | Q2 price move | Approx. cumulative move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apartments | -5.9% | +1.9% | -4.1% |
| Houses | -8.6% | +6.9% | -2.3% |
| Villas | -4.1% | +0.6% | -3.5% |
| Residential overall | -6.2% | +2.1% | -4.2% |
Are Rabat buyers coming back now?
Yes. Rabat property buyers came back strongly in the latest quarter, although transaction activity has not returned to its previous level.
Total transactions increased 61.2% quarter on quarter. Residential transactions rose 60.5%, while apartment sales climbed 62.5%.
The rebound sounds enormous because it came after an equally enormous decline. If 100 transactions fall by 55.4%, only 44.6 remain. Increasing that lower number by 61.2% gets us to about 71.9.
So the latest rebound still leaves overall activity roughly 28% below the level seen before the first-quarter collapse.
Rabat is clearly more liquid today than during the worst part of the correction, but it has not returned to the previous transaction pace.
Prices also rose while activity recovered. At least for now, the market is finding enough buyers around current valuations to stop the first-quarter decline from continuing.
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Is Salé property getting cheaper too?
We do not have equally strong official evidence that Salé prices have recently fallen, but Salé remains dramatically cheaper than Rabat today.
The Bank Al-Maghrib and ANCFCC city series gives us a clean transaction-price index for Rabat. We should not extend that decline to Salé and call it a Rabat-Salé correction.
Current asking-price data tell us something different and still useful.
Esti.ma currently tracks 998 active Rabat apartment listings and puts the median asking price at about 20,126 dirhams per square metre. Its Salé sample contains 840 listings with a median around 9,231 dirhams.
The typical advertised Rabat apartment therefore costs about 2.2 times as much per square metre.
The gap becomes even larger when we look at total budgets. Median asking prices are around 2.6 million dirhams in Rabat and 750,000 dirhams in Salé, partly because Rabat apartments in the dataset are also considerably larger.
Combining the two cities into one "Rabat-Salé property market" can hide a huge amount.
| Current apartment listings | Rabat | Salé | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median asking price/m² | 20,126 DH | 9,231 DH | Rabat +118% |
| Median asking budget | 2.60m DH | 750k DH | Rabat +247% |
| Median listed size | 127 m² | 83 m² | Rabat larger |
| Median gross yield | 5.34% | 6.45% | Higher in Salé |
Where can buyers still find cheaper property around Rabat?
Buyers looking for genuinely cheaper property around Rabat currently find the biggest price difference by changing neighbourhood or crossing into Salé, rather than waiting for another small Rabat-wide correction.
Current listings make the hierarchy pretty clear.
In Rabat, Esti.ma puts Souissi near 29,800 dirhams per square metre, Hay Riad around 24,100, Hassan around 21,200 and Agdal around 20,000. Even Yacoub El Mansour is close to 14,700.
Salé operates on a much lower price ladder. Sala El Jadida is around 10,300 dirhams per square metre, Tabriquet 10,000, Hay Chmaou roughly 9,200 and Said Hajji about 9,100. Abouab Sala is below 7,000 and Hay Alqods around 6,600.
There are exceptions. Bab Al Bahr currently sits near 22,900 dirhams per square metre, putting it closer to premium Rabat than ordinary Salé.
But the broad difference is enormous. A 4% Rabat correction can save perhaps 80,000 dirhams on a 2-million-dirham apartment. Moving from a 20,000-dirham-per-square-metre Rabat market to a 9,000-10,000-dirham Salé market changes the entire purchase budget.
For buyers focused mainly on price, location still matters far more than the recent Rabat correction.
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Are Rabat sellers actually cutting their asking prices?
We have solid evidence that completed Rabat transactions became cheaper, but current listing data cannot prove that sellers across Rabat are broadly slashing their asking prices.
The Bank Al-Maghrib and ANCFCC index is based on actual property transactions and is designed to track price movements over time. Current property portals show what owners or agents hope to receive.
Those numbers can diverge quite a lot.
Today, Rabat apartment listings still carry a median asking price above 20,000 dirhams per square metre in Esti.ma's dataset. Agdal is around 20,000, Hassan above 21,000 and Hay Riad above 24,000.
These are hardly fire-sale prices.
A market can still correct while advertised prices remain stubbornly high. Some listings simply sit unsold, while the properties that actually find buyers close at lower valuations.
So if someone browses Rabat property portals and thinks, "Prices do not look 4% cheaper," that does not contradict the official transaction data.
It probably means the gap between asking prices and what buyers will actually pay has become more important.
Has Rabat property finally become affordable?
No. Rabat property has become somewhat cheaper, but the current price level is still far too high to call the city broadly affordable.
Take the current Rabat median asking price of roughly 20,100 dirhams per square metre. A 90 m² apartment at that level costs about 1.81 million dirhams.
Apply the same calculation to Salé's current median of roughly 9,230 dirhams and the price drops to about 831,000 dirhams.
Now compare that structural difference with Rabat's recent correction. A hypothetical apartment worth 1.90 million dirhams loses around 76,000 dirhams if its price falls 4%.
That saving is meaningful for someone already committed to buying in Rabat. It barely changes the affordability equation for a household that could not previously finance a 1.9-million-dirham home.
Current government housing support underlines the same point. Morocco's direct-aid programme offers 100,000 dirhams for eligible homes priced up to 300,000 dirhams and 70,000 dirhams for homes between 300,000 and 700,000 dirhams. More than 105,000 buyers had already benefited when the government gave its latest update.
Mainstream Rabat listings sit far above those thresholds. Many properties in Salé come much closer.
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Are mortgage rates making Rabat property easier to buy now?
Only a little. Mortgage conditions have eased at the margin, but financing a typical Rabat apartment is still expensive.
Bank Al-Maghrib's recent lending data put average real-estate lending rates around 5%. That is low enough for mortgage credit to keep flowing, yet high enough for monthly repayments to remain substantial.
Using the current Rabat asking-price median, a 90 m² apartment costs about 1.81 million dirhams. With a 20% down payment, the buyer would borrow roughly 1.45 million.
At about 5.06% over 20 years, the monthly payment comes to approximately 9,600 dirhams before insurance and other ownership costs.
The equivalent 90 m² calculation at Salé's median price produces a home worth around 831,000 dirhams, a mortgage of about 665,000 dirhams and a monthly payment close to 4,400 dirhams under the same assumptions.
Lower Rabat prices help. They do not come close to eliminating the monthly affordability gap across the Bouregreg.
| Example 90 m² purchase | Rabat | Salé |
|---|---|---|
| Illustrative price | ~1.81m DH | ~831k DH |
| 20% deposit | ~362k DH | ~166k DH |
| Mortgage amount | ~1.45m DH | ~665k DH |
| Approx. 20-year payment at 5.06% | ~9,600 DH/month | ~4,400 DH/month |
Are Rabat rents falling along with property prices?
Rabat rents still look expensive today, and current rental listings show nothing resembling the sharp discount visible in the recent sales index.
Esti.ma currently puts the median advertised Rabat apartment rent at roughly 113 dirhams per square metre per month, with a median monthly budget close to 13,000 dirhams.
Salé is around 61 dirhams per square metre and roughly 4,500 dirhams per month.
Advertised Rabat rents are therefore about 85% higher per square metre.
That comparison also helps explain why Rabat does not look extraordinarily attractive as a pure rental-yield market. Esti.ma estimates a median gross yield around 5.3% for Rabat apartments, compared with roughly 6.5% in Salé.
There is no clean historical rental index here that lets us say Rabat rents have risen or fallen by a precise percentage recently. Current data simply show that rents remain high relative to Salé and that the sales correction has not suddenly made Rabat cheap for tenants either.
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Does Rabat-Salé still have enough housing demand to support prices?
Yes. Rabat-Salé still has a large underlying housing market, and the latest demographic evidence gives little support to the idea that demand is disappearing.
The 2024 census counted about 5.13 million residents across the Rabat-Salé-Kénitra region. Salé prefecture alone had roughly 1.09 million people, compared with around 516,000 in Rabat prefecture.
Household formation is even more useful than population alone when thinking about housing. The region went from roughly 1.02 million households in 2014 to about 1.30 million in 2024, an increase of close to 286,000 households over ten years.
That works out to average household growth of roughly 2.5% a year.
Of course, those households do not all buy property in Rabat. Many rent, remain with family or move toward Salé, Témara, Kénitra and other cheaper markets.
That is exactly how regional demand can stay healthy while expensive parts of Rabat still correct. When central prices get too difficult to finance, part of the pressure simply shifts elsewhere.
Is too much housing supply pushing Rabat prices down?
There is no strong evidence today of a Rabat-specific housing glut large enough to explain the whole correction.
Morocco certainly has plenty of unused housing. The HCP counted roughly 8.34 million urban homes in the 2024 census, including about 1.12 million vacant dwellings and another 1.3 million secondary or seasonal homes.
But national vacancy figures cannot tell us whether Rabat has too many apartments in the neighbourhoods and price brackets buyers actually want.
The more convincing explanation is a mismatch. Morocco can have empty homes while households still struggle to find suitable housing because vacant stock may be too expensive, poorly located, used seasonally or simply different from what local buyers need.
Around Rabat, cheaper alternatives in Salé and the wider metropolitan area also put pressure on high Rabat prices. Buyers who reject a 2.5-million-dirham Agdal apartment do not necessarily leave the housing market. They can change location.
Supply clearly matters, but the current evidence does not show rows of unwanted Rabat apartments forcing sellers into a city-wide liquidation.
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Could Rabat property prices start falling again?
Yes. Rabat property prices could weaken again, but the latest data do not show that happening yet.
The next few official quarters will tell us much more than another batch of property listings.
The clearest warning would be apartments falling again while transactions also weaken. Apartments give us the deepest residential market, so another meaningful decline there would be difficult to dismiss as villa-market volatility or a strange sales mix.
Financing deserves attention too. Mortgage borrowing costs remain around 5%, so Rabat buyers are still sensitive to prices. If credit conditions worsen while transaction activity fades, sellers could face renewed pressure.
Another quarter of stable or rising apartment prices with healthy transactions would instead make the first-quarter fall look increasingly like a sharp correction rather than the beginning of a prolonged slide.
For now, the second-quarter rebound has interrupted the downward move.
How much cheaper would Rabat need to get before we could call it genuinely cheap?
Rabat would need a much deeper and more persistent affordability improvement before we could describe the city as genuinely cheap.
A 3-4% discount from late-2025 levels is meaningful for someone negotiating a purchase today. It is small compared with the enormous differences between Rabat neighbourhoods and nearby Salé.
At current asking prices, Rabat apartments have a median around 20,100 dirhams per square metre. Salé sits near 9,200. Souissi approaches 30,000, Hay Riad is above 24,000, while several Salé districts remain around 9,000-10,000.
That puts the recent correction in perspective.
For Rabat to enter a real cheap cycle, we would want to see several more quarters of declining transaction prices, apartment prices making new lows, mortgage affordability improving and the premium over nearby alternatives narrowing noticeably.
We do not see that combination today.
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So, is Rabat property finally getting cheaper?
Partly. Rabat property is genuinely cheaper than it was at the end of 2025, but the latest evidence says the correction has paused rather than accelerated.
The numbers are strong enough to rule out the idea that nothing happened. Rabat's overall official property index remains about 3% below its end-2025 level, while residential property is roughly 4% lower. Apartments are also around 4% below their previous level.
Rabat has retained the largest decline from end-2025 among the major cities in the detailed official index.
But the latest quarter changed direction. Overall prices rose 1.9%, residential prices 2.1%, apartment prices 1.9%, and buyers returned in much larger numbers.
That rebound still did not recover the entire first-quarter decline.
Someone buying Rabat property today is therefore entering below late-2025 transaction-price levels, and there may be more room to negotiate than current asking prices suggest. Someone waiting for evidence of a continuing Rabat crash does not have it yet.
The biggest affordability opportunity around Rabat also remains geographical rather than cyclical. Current Salé apartment asking prices average less than half Rabat's level per square metre.
So yes, Rabat has finally become somewhat cheaper. Calling Rabat cheap, or saying prices are still falling today, would go further than the evidence allows.
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether Rabat property is genuinely getting cheaper by separating several questions that are often mixed together: whether completed transactions are cheaper, whether prices are still falling now, whether affordability has materially improved, and whether Rabat has become cheaper relative to nearby alternatives.
We treat Bank Al-Maghrib and ANCFCC transaction data as the main evidence for market direction because the official real-estate price index is based on completed transactions. Asking-price data are used for a different purpose: to show what sellers are currently advertising, how prices vary by neighbourhood, how Rabat compares with Salé, and what current rents and gross yields look like.
We compare prices with transaction volumes rather than reading either series in isolation. We also give more weight to apartments than to houses and villas because apartments represent a deeper market, while the smaller residential segments can move sharply when the mix of properties sold changes. Multi-quarter changes are compounded rather than simply added, so a rebound is measured against the preceding decline.
For affordability, we combine current asking prices with Bank Al-Maghrib's real-estate lending rates and simple mortgage examples. HCP census data are used for population, household growth and housing-stock context, while Moroccan government data provide the current thresholds and beneficiary figures for the direct housing-aid programme.
We do not treat all these datasets as interchangeable. Rabat's official transaction-price movement is not automatically extended to Salé, current asking prices are not presented as completed-sale prices, and national vacancy figures are used as structural context rather than proof of a Rabat-specific housing glut.
Key sources include Bank Al-Maghrib's official real-estate price index, Bank Al-Maghrib's Q2 2026 IPAI report, ANCFCC's real-estate price-index archive, ANCFCC's Q1 2026 IPAI report, ANCFCC's Q2 2026 IPAI report, Bank Al-Maghrib's lending-rate series, HCP's RGPH 2024 census portal, HCP's 2024 urban housing-stock study, the Moroccan government's latest housing-aid update, Esti.ma's Rabat apartment dataset, Esti.ma's Salé apartment dataset, and Esti.ma's current rental comparison.
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